How ex-Northern Ireland police chief is leading fight against cricket corruption

Manuka Oval, January 20, 2016. India, thanks to effortless hundreds from Virat Kohli and Shikhar Dhawan, are cruising towards victory in the fourth one-day international against Australia despite being set a target of 349. With more than 12 overs and the century makers still in, they have eight wickets in hand, they have only 72 more runs to score.

Then, out of the blue, Dhawan falls victim to a slower ball from John Hastings, cutting it straight to George Bailey at backward point.

On social media a clamour of accounts cry that the result was fixed. "India have thrown this match. No doubt in my mind. These shots are suicidal," said one. "India is on a losing streak ... Another one gone. Match seems fixed," said another.

It wasn't, of course. It was simply a classic collapse.

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But in the present environment around cricket - which has match-fixing investigations going on in three countries - and given the claims of past evidence of fixing made since the start of tennis' Australian Open, it was clearly an instinctive reaction for some as they watched the tourists' collapse.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the chairman of the International Cricket Council's anti-corruption unit, admits he is not immune to such thoughts either.

"I must say as a lifetime cop I become cynical," Flanagan told Fairfax Media.

"You see a highly professional sportsperson making some gaffe - in cricket, dropping what should be a dolly of a catch, or losing a wicket very easy. You watch it again and you watch the whole game and look for patterns...it does make you a little bit cynical.

"But by and large I'm certain at those high levels of the game the viewing and paying public can be generally assured that what they're watching [is] a fair contest."

It has, however, not yet been six years since the notorious Lord's Test between England and Pakistan in 2010 which, thanks to the no-ball plot participated in by Pakistan captain Salman Butt and bowlers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir, was very much not a pure contest.

And less than a fortnight ago Sri Lanka's bowling coach, Anusha Samaranayake, was suspended by his national body for two months over his relationship with a net bowler who, it is claimed, tried to bribe national team players to under-perform in a Test against the West Indies last October.

Principally, though, Flanagan believes the major threat of match fixing lies below the fully fledged international level. Amid a range of new appointments the ACU have just hired an analyst whose job is to determine each year where the main dangers lie, be it in domestic T20 leagues, associate cricket, the women's game or underage matches.

"What they need to thrive and survive is that an event is televised," says Flanagan, a former police chief of Northern Ireland.

"They don't care whether it's England against Australia for the Ashes or whether it's Kent and Sussex in an English county match. If they can manipulate some event and it's going to be televised then that can facilitate all the illegal gambling that would go on on the Indian subcontinent."

This week a former South Africa limited-overs batsman, Gulam Bodi, was banned for 20 years for trying to fix matches in the country's Ram Slam Twenty20 league. And in Hong Kong the 26-year-old Irfan Ahmed has been charged by the ICC with failing to report an approach by the same alleged fixer who paid Lou Vincent to corrupt matches in English county cricket.

Flanagan says the South African investigation is a fine example of the ACU working closely with a national board's integrity unit.

"We at the ACU based in Dubai received certain intelligence which we passed on to (Cricket South Africa)," he said. "We then worked together and the outcome is Bodi is banned for 20 years."

However, if they can claim that and Vincent's confessions as recent scalps then the ACU hasn't always enjoyed a perception of being successful in their crusade against corruption.

Since the unit was formed after the Hansie Cronje affair they've often been scrutinised for having secured limited prosecutions. When the Pakistan trio went down in cricket's biggest fixing scandal since Cronje, it wasn't the ACU who sprung them but the News of the World. The acquittal of Chris Cairns on perjury charges in London last November was also a blow. The verdict and the leaking before the trial of testimony given against Cairns by ex-teammates Vincent and Brendon McCullum and Vincent's ex-wife also raised concerns about whether players will still be willing to be whistleblowers against people they share dressing rooms with.

Flanagan, however, argues that criticism of the ACU based on prosecutions is unfair as their primary responsibility is stopping corruption before it occurs.

"In the past we have been the subject of criticism - I would say ill-informed criticism, in that people simply tried to add up how many people had been prosecuted and use that as the only measure of success," he said. "When actually what you prevent is much [more] important than what you end up prosecuting.

"We're not a police force. We don't have powers of arrest, we don't have powers of entry, powers of search. We're a regulatory body and we act only with the powers that the ICC board give us. We wouldn't seek to be a police force but [what] has been crucial is we have very close relationships with police forces around the world."

Among them is the Australian Federal Police, who the ACU formed an alliance with prior to last year's World Cup.

Match-fixing legislation introduced in Australia and New Zealand has also "led the world", says Flanagan, in making corruption of sport a criminal offence.

He believes those laws have been a key deterrent in Australia maintaining a clean record with its T20 league, the Big Bash, while others like the Ram Slam and Indian Premier League have been infiltrated.

If that has been a success story, the findings in South Africa, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong are a reminder of the ongoing threat.

Flanagan was Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary during a peace process in Northern Ireland that many thought would never come after years of conflict.

Twenty years later, he is not naive enough to think the task of ridding cricket entirely of corruption can be achieved but he's taking to the assignment with the same determination that he did with the transformation of policing in Belfast.

"I think we have to be realistic. It's like saying to a surgeon: 'Can you completely eliminate ill health?' " Flanagan says.

"I think what we must continuously do is make cricket a very difficult environment for those who would seek to corrupt it and continuously refine our practices to bring these people to book. Not only that they're properly dealt with but so that others are deterred from following in their footsteps."